For your paper, you are going to create a person (kind of like a character in a book but make sure they’re realistic). You are going to go through the phases of development of this person’s personality from a prenatal (before birth) to adult stage. So, it may be more simple to imagine a specific adult personality and outline it’s main characteristics (sociability, birth order, type of intelligence, mood, temperament, response type, emotionality, sexuality, etc.) and then back track through that person’s life all the way to before they were born to explain events or things, including maybe genetics, that helped shape the way they are.
**Before they were born would include things that happened to their biological mother when she was pregnant and how it affected them and maybe even during the birth process.
This is your person and there may or may not be things happening at certain developmental stages but the point is that by the end, we should be able to understand what helped shape that particular unique personality.
You can draw from real life or you can do total creative writing…I won’t know the difference so feel free. If you’re interested in abnormal psych you can give the person a psychological disorder, if you’re interested in personality, you can focus more on those theories like Freud (he’s a character himself 🙂 or if they have/had a certain life or career that interests you like they’re an artist or in the military or a spy or a stay at home parent, whatever your interest but make it fun and interesting for you to write. The important thing is that you address all the stages and see how they would realistically (sort of) play out based on what you’re learning about development.
The paper should be around 4 pages please…trust me, when you start writing, you’ll quickly realize it might take a lot more pages. You can use Erickson’s stages of development as a rough guide to important life stages but you don’t have to stick just to those, it’s much more fluid and flexible than that, because it’s life, real or imagined. But I do want you to go through the entire life span through late adulthood and address the important things that go on in those stages (based on the theories of development). Example: In the first two years, attachment is very important, whereas in adolescence, identity is critical.
